The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.

Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

Taste has no system and no proofs.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.